Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Class and culture

Published 11:32 am, Monday, June 5, 2017

Reformers always rank problem-solving high on their list of skills schools should teach. Unfortunately, it’s never been something reformers themselves have been good at.

Their long-term breach with common sense explains why reformers respond to low math skills by prescribing algebra for students who can’t dependably multiply. It’s why they address declining achievement by raising the standards too many students are already failing to meet. It’s why they address student failure by simply outlawing it. It’s why they propose to fix unsafe schools by restricting schools’ power to remove the students who make them unsafe.

The last time public education successfully responded to an academic crisis, Sputnik was in space and mushroom clouds were on the horizon. Americans abruptly realized that we needed to shake our postwar complacency and teach students more math and science. A generation later in 1983 A Nation at Risk warned that the pass/fail, open classroom, student-centered, content-and-discipline-light reforms of the 1970s had “squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge.” Reformers met Risk’s conclusion that we had “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling” by persisting in the same reforms that had brought us to the brink of education disaster. We’re still headed over that same cliff.

Schools have also grappled with social issues. When we addressed segregation and education equity in the 1960s, the quality of American public education wasn’t the problem. The task was to extend that high-quality education to more students, regardless of race or class. Unfortunately, in the process we compromised the quality of public education itself.

For example, because readiness and achievement placed many minority students in lower ability classes, we eliminated ability grouping altogether. Then we compounded our error by instituting instructional gimmicks like mastery learning and cooperative groups to orchestrate the fiction that one teacher could effectively and efficiently teach students with vastly different abilities and interests at the same time in the same class. “Differentiated instruction” is the latest incarnation of this smoke-and-mirrors trick.

No Child Left Behind was launched to eliminate disparities in achievement among rich, poor, white, and minority students. That’s why NCLB chopped students up into ethnic and economic subgroups and imposed sanctions on schools when just one subgroup failed.

Like many reformers, current law, regulationsb and initiatives continue to track deficiencies in ethnic and income groups’ achievement. Officials are reluctant to blame national policies or society at large for those deficiencies and even more unwilling to hold members of the subgroups themselves responsible for their performance. So once again schools become the scapegoat. Once again education policy and practice are compromised to suit a social and political agenda.

Enter the enlightened “culturally responsive teacher” who rejects “the myth of the culture of poverty.” According to advocates, the myth is that many “students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds” experience home conditions and share certain attitudes that hamper their academic achievement. Of course, before reformers condemned this idea as a myth, it was their justification for eliminating ability grouping, adding social services to school programs, and reducing academic and disciplinary expectations.

It’s neither accurate nor helpful to stereotype students, even though advocates don’t hesitate to stereotype teachers like me as “complicit” in “gross inequities.” I’ve dealt with enough middle-class students who lacked intelligence and ambition, as well as enough poor kids who excelled academically and personally, to know that race and family finances don’t dictate how a student will perform in the classroom or in life. But the fact is your parents’ income and education level, their attitudes toward school, how many books you have in your house — and how many parents — and how often you see an eye doctor tend to affect how early and how well you’ll learn to read.

You can’t argue that “poor people suffer disproportionately” from problems that “limit their abilities to achieve” while you also argue that foreseeing and acknowledging the effects of those problems amounts to “classism” and “prejudice.” According to proponents, the effect of poverty and class is real enough that schools must adapt to it but simultaneously not real enough that we can say it matters. Teachers must never have different expectations for poor children, but they simultaneously must be willing to expect and accept different things from them.

Huh?

By reformers’ standards, it’s appropriate to concentrate on immigration when you’re teaching immigrant children, even if that denies them a full survey and understanding of American history. Culturalists endorse using math class as a forum for discussing income redistribution, even if it means spending less time on math. They accept Black English Vernacular as equal to “so-called standard English,” even if that leaves students at a culturally-based linguistic disadvantage.

There’s nothing wrong with political agendas when you’re voting. But our positions on “housing and health care, living-wage jobs,” and “environmental injustice” can’t be allowed to infect how we teach reading or quadratic equations.

Outside the preservation of certain unalienable rights, politics shouldn’t govern how or what we teach. And my political views shouldn’t stand as a litmus test of whether I’m a good teacher.

A senator named McCarthy should have taught us that a long time ago.

As for what our students are and aren’t learning, we can’t expect schools to overcome all the obstacles we as individuals and as a society can’t.

We can hope, though, that in their efforts to make things better, schools don’t in the end make them worse.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.